50R-Going Ultra-Wide with Voigtlander

I love my Voigtlanders on Leica. How would they fare on GFX? I tried the Leica 50mm Noctilux and the 75mm Summilux earlier. Read about it here.

I decided to test the Voigtlander Super Wide-Heliar 15mm f/4.5 Aspherical III Lens on the GFX. The adapter was the ever reliable Fotodiox M to GFX. The Fotodiox is sturdy and has no play. I also think it looks beautiful.

GFX 50R with the Voigtlander 15mm and Fotodiox Adapter

GFX 50R with the Voigtlander 15mm and Fotodiox Adapter

Obviously, the image circle formed by this lens is for a full frame 35mm sensor so there is clear vignette on the edges. I dealt with it in two ways:

Shoot first and then crop out the vignette

Use the 35mm sensor mode on the camera which crops it in camera and thus there is no vignette

GFX 50R+Fotodiox+Voigtlander 15mm

I would recommend the 2ndoption as a lot of times cropping after shooting messes with the composition and I lost a few shots. In both the above cases you will lose some megapixels but the GFX sensor has more than enough of these anyway. Some purists might look down upon this but I am absolutely fine. In the 35mm crop mode it becomes a 30mp sensor.

Here are a few 100% crop samples. There is no smearing or smudging. This combination works great. So, till ultra-wide GFX lenses are released and I can afford them, I am going with this combination.

GFX 50R+Voigtlander 15mm 100% Crop

GFX 50R+Voigtlander 15mm 100% Crop

GFX 50R+Voigtlander 15mm 100% Crop

I tried quite a few long exposure shots without adding any filters. A cool feature in the GFX is that shutter speeds can be set up to 60 minutes so you will never need a trigger. The only problem is it is in fixed increments, 1 min, 2 min, 4 min, 8 min, 15 min, 30 min and 60 min so if you want something in between it might be a problem. Nevertheless, you can work around this by adjusting aperture/ISO and still use this feature.

Texas Capitol Long Exposure GFX 50R+Fotodiox+Voigtlander 15mm

Texas Capitol Long Exposure GFX 50R+Fotodiox+Voigtlander 15mm

Texas Capitol Long Exposure GFX 50R+Fotodiox+Voigtlander 15mm

Texas Capitol Long Exposure GFX 50R+Fotodiox+Voigtlander 15mm

Texas Capitol Long Exposure GFX 50R+Fotodiox+Voigtlander 15mm

Texas Capitol GFX 50R+Fotodiox+Voigtlander 15mm

Texas Capitol GFX 50R+Fotodiox+Voigtlander 15mm

Texas Capitol GFX 50R+Fotodiox+Voigtlander 15mm

Texas Capitol GFX 50R+Fotodiox+Voigtlander 15mm

Texas Capitol GFX 50R+Fotodiox+Voigtlander 15mm

Texas Capitol Long Exposure GFX 50R+Fotodiox+Voigtlander 15mm

Texas Capitol GFX 50R+Fotodiox+Voigtlander 15mm

The dynamic range of the 50R sensor is fantastic. I set the highlight control to -2 to avoid losing some highlight details. I could pull and push without losing details or the image looking smudgy.

The tilt screen is a boon when mounting the camera on a Tripod and shooting low angles or high angles to avoid perspective issues.

The RAW files were processed in Adobe Camera RAW. A few of them were processed with VSCO presets.